


non ci piove

by queenbaskerville



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e15 Revelations, Episode: s03e09 Penelope, Gen, Mentioned Tobias Hankel, One Shot, Past Drug Addiction, Past Drug Use, Season/Series 03, Short One Shot, Team as Family, rossi finds out about hankel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29288496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: Rossi notices Reid’s track marks.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 110





	non ci piove

**Author's Note:**

> you should never handle somebody’s struggle with addiction the way that criminal minds characters did (ignoring it and hoping it goes away) but you should also never work for law enforcement in the first place so I hope we all know better than to do anything criminal minds characters do
> 
> this has been done before but i had the convo drafted and figured I might as well put it somewhere. title is an italian idiom that basically means “no doubt about it”

Rossi had not been with the team very long yet when he came into Hotch’s office, closed the door, and said, apropos of nothing, “Does Reid still have a drug problem?”

“No,” Hotch said. He put aside the document he’d been filling out. “But I think you knew that, or you wouldn’t have come to me about it.”

The implication, You would have reported it instead, hung in the air. Rossi was not bothered by it. He probably would have. And he knew that Hotch, as much as he wouldn’t have liked it, would’ve understood why. Rossi was new to the team, and he had—if mistakenly so—underestimated Reid at first, and so he would’ve thought automatically that the heroin abuse was a confirmation of his very first assumption—Reid was the weakest link, and not someone he wanted watching his back. Rossi would’ve held no compunctions about reporting a federal agent for drug abuse, especially not when the federal agent in question seemed at first to him to be too young for the job and a danger to the rest of the team.

“What gave it away?” Hotch said.

“He wore a short-sleeved shirt into work the day we got our most recent case,” Rossi said.

The track marks were old and faded and few enough that most people wouldn’t have noticed them at first. Rossi hadn’t been looking for the marks, but he was a profiler, and profilers weren’t “most people,” so, yeah, he noticed them at some point during the day. He also noticed that there was no way at least one other person on the team hadn’t seen them, and nobody looked concerned about it; an open secret, then, and an old one.

Hotch looked tired. He gestured for Rossi to sit, so he did, and he waited for Hotch to gather his thoughts.

“Last year, Reid was abducted during an investigation by an unsub who held and tortured him for two days,” Hotch said. “He repeatedly dosed Reid with dilaudid during the course of Reid’s captivity.”

Whatever Rossi had been expecting Hotch to say, this wasn’t it. He leaned back in his chair.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah,” Hotch said. It wasn’t a sigh, but it was close. “I let it go on for too long. First without realizing, and then without doing anything about it. But he got clean, and he’s a valuable member of this team.”

“I can see that,” Rossi said, and he took the statement of Reid’s value for what it was: not a threat, and not a plea, either, but an invitation. Even after admitting a mistake—I let it go on for too long—Hotch was inviting Rossi to trust his judgement. And he wanted Rossi to trust Reid, too.

Rossi figured he could give that a shot.

“How did that case turn out, by the way?” Rossi said.

“Sometimes Hankel live-streamed to us what he was doing to Reid,” Hotch said. “Reid gave us hints about his location when he knew we were watching. We figured out where he was, and while we were looking for him, he got his hands on Hankel’s gun and shot him in self-defense.”

“He’s a strong kid,” Rossi said.

“I know,” Hotch said, with the grim air of someone who wished that that wasn’t how it had been proven.

“He doesn’t talk about it,” Hotch added after a moment.

“I probably wouldn’t want to talk about it, either,” Rossi said. He rose from his chair, patted the back of it, and gave Hotch a nod before leaving his office.

Rossi didn’t bring it up with Hotch again. He did, however, look up the case file; if this was something Reid was going to be sensitive about, Rossi needed to know everything about it so he wouldn’t be caught off guard on a day Reid faltered.

The information in the file was nothing short of horrifying. Reid’s own report was the worst. That eidetic memory, it wasn’t for nothing. Rossi thought about how old Reid was at the time this happened—or should he say, how young Reid was—and he was, frankly, shocked Reid hadn’t quit and looked for work elsewhere.

It was not until Garcia was shot that Rossi thought he understood. Reid kept his behavior during the investigation very calm and professional, letting Morgan do most of the territorial protectiveness and the comforting, but his affection was still very obvious; the team was Reid’s family. Even if he would be safer in another career, he would have to be dragged away from them kicking and screaming. Had been dragged away, Rossi corrected himself, and came running right back.

Rossi himself didn’t feel that way about the team, but when he found himself in the local gift shop on their next case, wondering if a trinket was harmless enough to be a get-well present and gaudy enough that Garcia would even like it, he had to pause and take stock of himself. However Reid felt about the team, the whole “family” thing—Rossi prayed it wasn’t contagious.

(It was.)


End file.
